Packets of catchup

More tea-leaf reading on the weekend ahead.

-- Caption, please:

Mine: "Do what now?"

-- More 'duh'.

White voters of all ages were less likely to back Democrats this year than in elections past, helping Republicans nationwide but most acutely in the South — and overpowering Democratic efforts to turn out their core supporters among blacks and Hispanics.

In a nation growing ever more diverse, political forecasters repeatedly warn Republicans they must improve their appeal among minorities in order to remain competitive in the long term.

But for the Democrats, dominating the vote among minorities isn't enough to win elections today — and it won't be in the future if the GOP is able to run up similar margins among whites, who still make up a majority of voters in every state.

"The rule of thumb was Democrats could win with 90 percent of the African-American vote and 40 percent of the white vote," said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

"But now very few Democrats could think about getting 40 percent of the white vote. They're trying to get 30 percent. In the Deep South states, from South Carolina to Louisiana, it's very hard for the Democratic candidate to get 25 percent of the white vote."

-- Here is the best explainer for the current political climate in the USA.

In 2004, Republicans won big, and Democrats were left trying to figure out what went wrong.

Then in 2006, Democrats won big, and they decided everything was fine. Republicans merely shrugged it off as the 6-year-itch that bedevils parties that hold the White House in a president's last midterm.

2006 was a wipeout for Texas Democrats, kos.  Let's forget it, he's rolling.

2008, Democrats won big again, and Republicans were left fumbling for excuses, but mainly decided it was Bush's fault and an artifact of Barack Obama's historic campaign.

In 2010, Republicans won big, so they were validated. All was fine! Democrats were left fumbling.

In 2012, Democrats won big, so they decided everything was fine. Demographics and data to the rescue! Republicans decided to rebrand, until they decided fuck that, no rebranding was needed.

And now in 2014, Republicans are validated again in the Democrats' own 6-year-itch election. Democrats are scrambling for answers.

And I'll tell you what the future looks like:

In 2016, Democrats will win big on the strength of presidential-year turnout. Republicans will realize they really have a shit time winning presidential elections, and maybe they should do something about that!

In 2018, Republicans will win on the strength of off-year Democratic base apathy, and they'll decide everything is okay after all. And it's going to be brutal, because those are the governorships we need for 2020 redistricting. Republicans will then lock up the House for another decade.

Then in 2020, Democrats will win on presidential year turnout, and  ... you get the point.

So in short, we have two separate Americas voting every two years. We have one that is more representative, that includes about 60 percent of voting age adults. Then we have one where we can barely get a third of voting age adults to turn out, and is much whiter and older than the country. And Democrats can win easily with the one, and Republicans can win easily with the other.

And that cycle won't be broken until 1) the Democrats figure out how to inspire their voters to the polls on off years, or 2) Republicans figure out how to appeal to the nation's changing electorate.

And given that each party is validated every two years after a blowout loss, the odds of either happening anytime soon? Bleak.

-- And the best thing about red waves is that we don't have to listen to any whining about voter "fraud" from the King Street Patriots and True the Vote.  We'll take our little blessings where we can find them.  I'm pretty certain that will only be a two-year reprieve.

Latinos aren't going to rescue Texas Democrats

Local attorney Mark Yzaguirre.

Various observers will address particular points and provide certain suggestions, but let me focus anyone reading this piece on one figure: 40 percent. That number is the percentage of the Latino vote in Texas that I previously suggested is necessary for the Republican Party to maintain a strong working majority of the general election vote in Texas.

So what percentage of the Latino vote did Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott get in his victory over the Democratic nominee, State Senator Wendy Davis? Forty-four percent, according to exit polling from the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. If one breaks those numbers down by gender, 50 percent of Latino men and 39 percent of Latina women voted for Abbott. While African-American voters in Texas went 92 percent in favor of Davis, 73 percent of non-Latino white voters supported Abbott. Other exit polling largely matches the UT-Austin numbers. That combination of Anglo and Latino voters gave Abbott the landslide victory he achieved on Election Day. 

Well, he just put Marc Campos out of business.

The results of the 2014 elections vindicate that position. Democrats who think that the Latino vote is a lock for the Democratic Party need to be disabused of that false assumption immediately. The numbers cited above show that. Also, if one looks at county-by-county data, Greg Abbott was able to get strong pluralities in many of the generally pro-Democratic Latino counties of South Texas.

[...]

This election shows that the Republican Party in Texas is quite capable of making a play for a solid portion of the Texas Latino vote. If Democrats want to have any hope of changing the dynamics of statewide politics in Texas, they need to lose their illusions about a coming tide of Latino voters who will save them. They need to work to expand their lead among Latino voters and find a way to bring in a decent percentage of current non-Latino GOP voters into the fold. If they fail to do both, their wait for a demographic transformation will be a very long one that may never end.

Yeah, some good solid soul-searching is in order for Team Blue.  A little existential angst never killed anybody (who was able to pull themselves back from the edge, anyway).  That would be a good place, in fact, to start... once all the hand-wringing and crying and finger-pointing and backbiting work their way out of everybody's system.

Updates: More here.  And Stace with with more and better.

Harris County results: seeing red

Disillusionment abounded on Election Night locally, as the blue slate came up short everywhere.  It began and ended with straight ticket voting, which the Republicans led in mailed ballots by a 54-46 margin, padded with a 56-44 win in early voting, and closed out on Election Day at 53-46.  The one percent remaining went to local Greens and Libertarians.  That averaged out to 54-45-1, or a 44,000-vote countywide bonus for the Reds over the Blues.

Most of the political advertising that arrived in my mailbox this cycle was from First Tuesday, a PAC controlled by Houston attorney Dave Mattheisen.  Mattheisen has long been the county's liberal kingmaker; he recruited and screened prospective judicial candidates for Gerry Birnberg, the HCDP chair before Lane Lewis.  I received by my count five large card mailers from them, the last of which arrived at end of EV and looked like this:

Here's a picture of all the mail I got from First Tuesday (left and across the top), the HGLBT PAC, the Houston Stonewall Young Democrats and HCDP (the three at the bottom), and the Texas Association of Realtors advocating a 'yes' on Prop. 1 (the three middle right).  I also got a card from John Culberson (fuck you, asshole) and from Borris Miles, my state representative.

Maybe you can see that the partisan pieces are almost all promoting a straight-ticket Democratic ballot vote. I said more than my piece on the wisdom of this.  Further, the First Tuesday cards were aimed squarely at women voters, which we now know were lost to Abbott.

You might feel a little down, but I doubt you feel as sick to your stomach as Dave Mattheisen.

On to the county results.

-- John Cornyn carried Harris County 54-45, the same as the straight ticket vote.  Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by a 51-47 margin, it was Patrick over Van de Putte by 50-47, Paxton 52-46,  Hegar over Collier 51-46, Pee Bush 54-43 over John Cook, and Sid Miller over Jim Hogan 53-44.  Ryan Sitton got ahead of Steve Brown 52.5 -43.7 and  the statewide judicials were divided in a similar 53-44 pattern, plus or minus one or less than one.  The remaining 2-3% in statewide races was split between the Gs and the Ls.

At the Harris County courthouses, the story was the same.  The lone Democrat on the 14th Court of Appeals, Jim Sharp, lost 57-43 in the district and lost Harris County by nearly the same spread as the straight ticket votes, 54-46.  Kyle Carter, the challenger to Chief Justice Kem Frost, lost by almost exactly the same margins.  Click here and go to page 17 if you like.  Some judge candidates closed it to 53-47.

In the county's marquee tilt, District Attorney Devon Anderson defeated Democratic challenger Kim Ogg 53-47, so it's clear that only a small number of Republicans crossed over.  Thanks anyway, Big Jolly.  The lone challenger left standing to county judge Ed Emmett, Green David Collins, got over 80,000 votes and almost 17% of the total vote.  There were 200K undervotes in that race, ten times as many as there were in the DA contest.  A Libertarian, Brad Miller, got 4% of the vote in the County Criminal Court #10 race, won by the Republican D. J. Spjut  52-44 over Democrat George Barnstone, who organized the Final Friday events locally.  And a Green, Clint Davidson, got 2% of the vote in CCC #13, which was won by R Don Smyth over D Jason Luong, 54-44.

And Clerk Stan Stanart got another four years to figure out how to do his job.  The numbers were 54.3- 45.7 over Ann Harris Bennett.  Seeing a trend yet?

Proposition 1, taking money out of the RDF to give to TxDOT to fix some of our roads, carried Harris County by almost precisely the same 4-1 margin as it did the state.  I voted against.

Still some national Congressional races, the Texas statehouse, and a few ballot initiatives that had a progressive slant to them coming.

The early take on turnout

Harris County results and analysis forthcoming.  First a word on electorate participation.

I thought the efforts made by the BGTX in Harris County and the rest of the state -- in conjunction and sometimes in conflict with the infrastructure provided by the HCDP and chair Lane Lewis, his lieutenant Chris Young, the myriad of volunteer workers in both organizations who walked blocks and made phone calls in the weeks and even months leading up to November 4 -- were substantial and a significant improvement over years past.  I thought that because I participated in them, saw the hard work being done, and even did a little of it myself.

But the results simply don't support the premise that they -- we -- made a difference in the historical record.  We may have made a difference if we could compare the results we got to results we would have gotten if no effort had been expended, or if the efforts we made were short-circuited as they have been in the recent past.  But we cannot, of course, do that.

We could blame some of it on photo ID legislation, or even the evisceration of the VRA by the SCOTUS.  But we don't know how much that might have affected turnout because essentially all we have is anecdotal data.  That's why the litigation rests upon interpretation of the law's effects by either a liberal judge ("harsh undue burden") or a conservative one ("personal responsibility").  From the beginning of this year, I blogged repeatedly that Democrats should not wait for the courts to come to their rescue in this regard; that they should actively assist new as well as old voters with the documentation to get themselves legal.  We won't know for awhile, and may never know for certain, if that was an effort which fell short and actually dented turnout.

I do not think that Dave Mann of the Texas Observer has an accurate premise here, either.

Update: Socratic Gadfly disagrees.  He and I rarely do.

What is accurate to say is that Democrats stayed home in droves across the United States, and more so in Texas and certainly in Harris County.  But as it turns out and as Charles is alluding, so did Republicans.  So my own premise -- still in need of some empirical support itself -- is that Houstonians and Texans and Americans are becoming less and less engaged in the electoral process for any variety of reasons.  Declining voter turnout is the only evidence I have beyond anecdotal at this time.

It's remarkable to me that so many Texans -- such a huge number of Americans -- just simply don't care about elections, candidates, issues, and so on.  And I don't have any suggestions to address this seemingly widespread apathy any more than anybody else does.  Having written that, I have some better understanding -- acquired during this cycle -- about those liberals and progressives who have quit on the process and given up on the system.  And that leads me to posit that a much larger group of people, thinking less about matters of the public interest than the rest of us, are similarly tuned out.  But theirs seems more out of disinterest than it does hostility.

Just an early observation.  Going to have to think about it some more before I know what to think about it.